For those who wanted closure on Stephen’s first Cub Scout Pinewood Derby, he did really well. After years of me railing on dads who do the cars for their kids, I… kind of became the monster. But I tried not to! Stephen asked me how I would cut the car, and I picked the easiest boat-like shape that occurred to me, so it would look like a roadster and be a simple, un-fancy little wooden vehicle. Which as it turns out, is the best possible pinewood design EVER. I made essentially two cuts at the front and back, and then made him sand and paint it. What made the difference I think was when we had to add weights to get to the allowed five ounce limit. The most potential energy would be gained by putting the weight up as high and far back as possible, which is pretty high since we left the car tall.

As a result Stephen kind of… kept winning. Like, every time- though it did tie a couple of races. Thankfully, this is a non-competitive scout troop and there were no trophies or anything to make the event potentially traumatic like my childhood experience that made me think the whole world was rigged against me. But next year I’m going to try harder to not make suggestions.

What could I have done different? My son did ask the right questions- should we put the weights on the bottom? I felt one of the points of the building was to learn something about basic physics, which is essentially all I understand about physics. I tried my best to explain why putting the weight high in back would help. We didn’t do any of the fancy wheel-sanding and axle balancing I’ve seen that people do. In fact, I chipped some of the wood putting the nails in and had to drive staples into the bottom to keep the nails from falling back out. I think bumbling across a good shape is what we did right- I later looked up the first pinewood cars, and here’s what Cub Master Don Murphy came up with in 1953…

See, it looks like an old (then new) Grand Prix roadster. I think everyone carving the cars like Formula 1 racers is slowing them down. And of course, you don’t have to account for car features like where the driver goes. Ours didn’t turn any heads in the looks department; in fact Stephen seemed fairly bummed at the polite smiles he got when all the parents came through to look at the boys’ cars, as they raved over others. I was just hoping he’d do decent enough that his pride wouldn’t take a complete hit. So, he went from a pre-race quivering chin to walking out talking about himself as a modern Ettore Bugatti, telling one of his friends about how he wisely kept putting graphite in the wheels every day (which wouldn’t work).

But now I have some ideas about how to hold back in the future, like I won’t put the wheels on for him next year. I’m still not going to let him work the bandsaw though.